Dramatic Poetry Research Articles

“¡¡¡SOY NEGRA!!!”/“i found god in myself”: Shange, Santa Cruz, and Self-Love as Savior

In this article, I assert that Ntozake Shange and Victoria Santa Cruz engage in a “diasporic dialogue” through their dramatic poetry—a dialogue that transcends genre, language, form, and geographies. I believe they do so not through the actual exchange of words, but rather through the Afro-diasporic aesthetics and Black Feminist messaging at the heart of their respective works: for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf and “Me Gritaron Negra.” I am invested in the conversation between their pieces—and the consciousness transformation such a conversation allows. By placing these works in conference for the first time and investigating the ways they “talk” to each other, I seek to demonstrate the unique vitality of theatre pieces—especially those led by Black women from across the African Diaspora—as embodied practices of liberatory politics and the transforming (and transformational) Black Feminist thought of the 1970s. Furthermore, by honing in on and getting up close to praxes and articulations of self-acceptance, self-definition, and self-determination in both Shange’s and Santa Cruz’s works, I will demonstrate the usefulness of this kind of embodied performance to something we might think of as the radical political potential of self-love.

From the Orphic texts to the Homeric Epics and to the Dramatic Poetry:

Logos is the most important requested thing, because this is the internal joint which unites beings and their evolution. We think of Logos as a gnosiological and not ontologiacal factor. We are making mention of Logos as a real process and not as a simple manner, because we believe that human Logos could be known by the man of thought and action. Orphic texts rasionalize the universe as a kind of movements and as a dynamic evolution. They can see inside the universal forces the very cause, manner and the purpose of proceeding and improvement, so far these forces are not naughtily thrown any more. Homer’s epics offered an invaluable service to the Humane spiritual arsenal: They connected men with the macrocosm powers, Odysseus, Achilles are made of the same universal powers. These powers are the very God’s content, twelve Gods evolve kosmos according to these universal powers in a humane manner. Human qualities which are attributed to the gods help men to imitate this anthropomorphic way of the gods in order human Logos slowly intervene to the universe world. All these interventions could be transferred through Logos inside human society, inside human organizations. Odysseus learns to use Logos through his contact with the human form of goddess Athena – who represents the Wisdom. So, he can justify his actions, he is able of categorizing his life, he manages to complete his Nostos, the very purpose of Him. In the 5th century a.d. Athens was the sum of people like the Odysseus. The glory City of Athens was an aggregate of thinking people like a Kingdom of wisdom, which is projected in the poetical work of tragic poetry. The reasonable Subject of the Athenean Democracy came up through the Orphic texts and Homeric Epics (we should not forget that Peisistratus (an Athenean tyrant) introduced the Homeric Epics because he thought that these texts could cultivate Athenean adolescents). This reasonable Subject believed that he could transform the universal powers (which influence the earth movement) into ideal social forces, which are able to produce atomic and social happiness and eydaimonia. The bitter denial, which happened through Peloponnesian War, disappeared this kind of human individualism as a piece of universal power. So far kosmic forces separated into two parts: what I can think (idea) and what I could act (praxis). Humanity proceeded glorifying not the sense of what there really exists but glorifying the sense of what I am thinking that there really exists. Plato and Aristotle supported this appreciable process because they thought that idea and not what there really exist is the basis of Human skepsis and praxis.

Sovereign States: Byatt, Bard and coronations

This essay is written from the perspective of an Anglophone South African in the ongoing aftermath of ‘state capture’ in this land. It draws on Shakespeare’s preoccupation with monarchy or sovereignty, in the context of a time of transition (in the UK and the Commonwealth of which South Africa is a member) from the reign of Elizabeth II to that of Charles III. It is grounded for that reason in a novel by A.S. Byatt, The Virgin in the Garden, which deals with the coronation (the first to be televised) of the late queen in 1953. That novel is also about a largescale outdoor verse drama on the life of Elizabeth I, the ‘Virgin Queen’. Byatt shows us how the press spoke, in high earnest, of the new dispensation. She is earnest herself, and also ironic, and at times satirical. So is this essay

Teaching the Language of the Mother Drama From the Lexical-Semantic and Morphological Point of View

Huseyin Javid succeeded in bringing the language of poetry to the stage for the first time with the Mother verse drama. He is a master of powerful artistic monologues. The dramatist builds monologues so skillfully that the character’s inner hand, outlook on life, society, heart palpitations, tremors, excitement and other feelings attract the attention of the reader at the first moment. H. Javid was a lover of contrasts. M. C. Jafarov clearly observed that in this work opposite moral qualities such as generosity and selfishness, bravery and cowardice, simplicity and arrogance were contrasted, and all these were shown in living characters. An important aspect is added to this, that here the images were divided into two fronts based on their positions and moral and spiritual qualities: the poor and the rich. Therefore, the author also saw the main contradiction in the socio-political situation and showed it as an irreconcilable contradiction between the poor and the rich, the powerful and the oppressed.

A Study of Elpis in Ancient Greek Literary Laments and Songs for the Dead: Hope and the Tradition of Greek Lament

Much of current scholarship aims at reconstructing ritual lamentation based on evidence from early Greek epic and lyric poetry and fifth-century tragedy. This paper, although it is an examination of a specific human emotion, elpis, within the corpus of early and classical Greek epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry that are thought to preserve the oral traditions of the genre, takes also into consideration the inscribed ancient Greek songs for the dead; that is archaic and classical epigrams and their later counterparts encountered, mainly, in the Greek Anthology. A study of elpis, a highly culturally dependent emotion, within these contexts will allow us to have a glimpse of the hermeneutic frames provided by each poetic genre, their performative contexts, and the expectation of the audiences, as well as of the general world-view that is shared by the poetic genres in question. In other words, a study of elpis in ancient Greek laments and songs for the dead will enable us to have a slightly clearer image of the evolution and the nature of this oral genre from archaic times until the Late Antiquity.

Eliot’s Thoughts on the Possibility of a Poetic Drama in ‘The Possibility of a Poetic Drama’ and Other Essays

In the essays entitled “The Possibility of a Poetic Drama” and “A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry,” Eliot attempts to find a possible answer to that question by looking into the issues such as form and relation of religion to literature. In another essays, “The Romantic Englishman, the Comic Spirit, and the Function of Criticism” and “Marie Lloyd,” focus on the form of music hall comedy and one of its most representative artist to find the possibility of reviving the poetic drama in the modern age. This poetic drama, as Eliot makes it clear, is not a play that is put in verse but something else altogether. It is in a way more realistic than the ‘naturalistic drama’ because it should take away the familiar surface of things and lay bare what lies underneath or within.

Performativity and Theatricality of the Absolute Spirit in Hegel’s Theory of Dramatic Poetry in Modernity

Im Unterschied zu der philosophischen Diskussion über Drama und Theater in der Tradition von Platon/Sokrates und Aristoteles über Rousseau und Diderot zu Artaud und Brecht, die Theatralität entweder ab- oder aufwerten, nimmt Hegel einen mittleren Standpunkt zwischen den Extremen ein. Er wertet Theatralität weder auf noch ab, sondern behauptet vielmehr, sie sei eine unverzichtbare Dimension des poetischen Dramas, das dadurch erst seine ideale und fiktive Wirklichkeit sinnlich vergegenwärtigt. Während die dramatische Poesie der Vormoderne Konflikte zwischen sittlicher Substantialität und individueller Subjektivität darzustellen und zu versöhnen vermochte, liegt die Sache in der Moderne anders. Im Zuge der fortschreitenden Entsubstantialisierung der individuellen Subjektivität tendiert das moderne Schauspiel zu reiner Theatralität und es verliert seine poetische Kraft zur geistigen Versöhnung sittlicher Konflikte.

GRIGORYEV A.A. SOBRANIE SOCHINENII (COLLECTED WORKS): IN 10 VOLS. ED. BY B.F. EGOROV AND A.P. DMITRIEV. VOL. I–III. ST. PETERSBURG, 2021–2022

The new Collected Works of Grigoryev aim to include everything he had written. No edition of this author has ever reached such a scope. Vol. I includes Grigoryev’s poetry, vols. II and III comprise verse drama, both original and translated from French, Greek and English. The present collection was conceived by B.F. Egorov, who would study Grigoryev’s life and oeuvre for more than half a century. He worked in cooperation with A.P. Dmitriev, who took over this labour after Egorov’s death. This edition continues the scholarly tradition of the Pushkin House.

The Historical and Political Portrait of Time in Tamar Hovhannisyan’s Poetry

Key words: politics-slaughter of life, woman-creator of life, poetic mirror of the face of time, poignant peer review, a woman’s heart, geopolitical warfare The light and shadow of time, harmony and ferocity are bipolar phenomena, the ebb and flow of spiritual emotions that determine the pulsating tension of historical and political poetry of Tamar Hovhannisyan. The main research issues in the article are the opposition of the woman-creator of life and politics-slaughter of life in Tamar Hovhannisyan’s poetry and the face of time reflected in a poetic mirror. The political rotation of the Earth in the historicopolitical and historicopsychological poetry of Hovhannisyan penetrates into the heart of a woman, varying from a personal model of psychological perception of time to an impersonal model, from individual to the universal poetry. Tamar Hovhannisyan’s poetry is women’s poetry, which embodies and reflects the tremendous pain caused by a man, the invasion of death into the valley of life, the victory of the hell over the heaven. In her works, the political course of the Earth wails like a stretched nerve string, with variations in voice and style, with the harmony of emotions. Tamar Hovhannisyan’s poetry transforms into the poetic mirror of time, in which her portraits are displayed, refracted and reflected. This is a dramatic poetry of the conflict between a woman and politics, the painful opposition of the life-giving woman to life-destroying geopolitics. Tamar Hovhannisyan's poetry is exceptional and engrossing with its original art of creating images, a unique rhythm of lines and feminine depths of thoughts and feelings. Combining the peculiarities of Western and Armenian literature, subtly integrating them or making smooth transitions, Hovhannisyan created a deeply personal, but also universal poetry, which is the subject of study for present and future philologists.

Body Language: Making Love in Lyric in Romeo and Juliet

Abstract With a particular focus on an intensive close reading of the scenes between the lovers and their portrayal of desire and intimacy, this essay discusses how Shakespeare transforms lyric poetry, especially its formal features, not simply into dramatic poetry but into theatre, demonstrating how Shakespeare creates the lovers’ world and the passionate intimacy of their relationship through the embodiment of lyric forms, especially the sonnet, the epithalamium, and the aubade. Explicitly thinking about bodies (and bodies on stage) rather than ‘the body’, it draws on a number of Shakespeare’s sources, especially Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, as well as Arthur Brooke’s Romeus and Juliet, exploring in precise detail how Shakespeare works with them, the particularity of his transformations, and their effects.1

Dramatic Poetry as Rhetorical Form: The Case of Sarah Piatt’s “Mock Diamonds”

The programmatic study of narrative and poetry has stalled without engaging many approaches to narrative inquiry and without comprehending the sui generis achievements of poetical representation. This essay attempts to rejuvenate narratological and specifically rhetorical interest in poetry by carefully examining the dramatic poem—where poetic form intersects with several of narrative theory’s abiding enthusiasms: character, voice, perspective, performance. Marrying theoretical speculation to both practical criticism and literary history, the argument extrapolates from Sarah Piatt’s “Mock Diamonds” a twofold rhetoric of the dramatic-poetic mode. It posits first that, often through segmentation and related phenomena, dramatic poems formally enact a competition between individual communicants and the discursive contexts that threaten to supplant their perspectival authority. Second, it maintains that dramatic poems coordinate a dialogic interplay between (1) character speech, whose semantic content manifests the character-speaker’s intentions, and (2) versification, whose formal qualities signify outside the represented scene. The recitative performance conventionally mandated by poetry integrates these two communicative channels such that they mean the embodied expression they specify together. That culminative detail underscores the essay’s broadest implication: namely, that poetry’s emphases on readerly enactment and sonic, somatic, and typographic patterning generate rhetorical effects not readily available in other representational discourses. Dramatic poetry, as epitomized by “Mock Diamonds,” demonstrates the power of poetic form to renovate, and hence to augment, prevailing theories of even the most familiar narrative constituents.

"РУССКАЯ КОЛЛЕКЦИЯ" ЦЕНТРА ГУМАНИТАРНЫХ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЙ ИМЕНИ ГЭРРИ РЭНСОМА ТЕХАССКОГО ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОГО УНИВЕРСИТЕТА В ОСТИНЕ

The article presents the information about the documents on the history of Russia stored at the Humanities Research Center at Texas State University at Austin (USA). The Harry Ransom Center for humanitarian studies owns an extensive collection of the documents received from individuals (free of charge or on a reimbursable basis) in the form of collections, funds, scattered documents, books, art objects from across Europe and America. The archive accepts for keeping not only the documents, but also the works of fund-makers. Visitors to the archive have an opportunity to conduct research in various fields of humanitarian knowledge: from the English dramatic poetry of the 17th century to the works of modern African novelists, from the modern French musical compositions to the Italian poetry of the 13th century. The Humanities Research Center has also collected a set of documents on Russian history, literature, music, and painting. The information on the history of Russia is contained in the diaries, letters, memoirs of Russian emigrants and American citizens. The most extensive part of the collection consists of the letters discussing the organization of political movements in the emigration environment, the issues of everyday life, the matters connected with moving from Europe to the United States. The documentary complex also includes the sketches of theatrical costumes and scenery, music score manuscripts, the photographs of the Russian artists, composers, actors who left Soviet Russia in 1918–1925. The chronological framework of the documentary complex covers the period from the First World War to the beginning of the Thaw period.

Action and Suffering, Knowing and Not Knowing in Murder in the Cathedral and the Bhagavad-Gita

Before we bring a moral verdict on Thomas Becket’s progress as an evolved character, it will help to see the rationale of non-attachment in the light of verses from the Bhagavad-Gita. The passages on knowing-not, knowing, and action/suffering are re-examined here. All by himself, Thomas knows little. What he would know differently, both of/ for himself and others, requires that he seek his dharma by discovering how false or illusory his knowledge has been, and why. This essay tries to capture the pedagogic logic of learning what we know and what we do not. Learning by reciprocal exchange becomes a model for those who are averse to arguing from results. Intertexts like W. B. Yeats’s “Vacillation” and E. M. Forster’s “Hymn Before Action” help them read the Archbishop’s Christmas sermon all afresh. This essay concludes by arguing how Eliot himself found dramatic poetry an ideal vehicle for presenting action precisely the way the Gita exhorts us.

Van Gogh and Myth in A. S. Byatt’s Still Life

ABSTRACT Van Gogh is a character that appears in a verse drama entitled The Yellow Chair, a story within a story, in A. S. Byatt’s Still Life, the second novel of the Frederica Potter Quartet. In this novel, both Van Gogh’s paintings and a major life event – his agon with the French artist Paul Gauguin in Arles – are represented on stage. This paper argues that Van Gogh’s self-mutilation is a mimesis of the various facets of the myth of the sun depicted in his numerous paintings (i.e. the life and death of vegetation in nature, the rising and setting of the sun in the sky, and the division of the white sunlight into both complementary and spectrum colors). The myths of fertility incorporated in Van Gogh’s narrative in the novel epitomize the main character Frederica Potter’s erotic experiences, who, as a Cambridge undergraduate, believes that the body is the ultimate source of all good in the world and that “marriage [is] the end of every good story.” 1

Gustav Freytags lateinische Qualifikationsschriften De initiis scenicae poesis apud Germanos (1838) und De Hrosuitha poetria (1839)

Abstract The article investigates Gustav Freytag’s dissertation De initiis scenicae poesis apud Germanos [On the beginnings of dramatic poetry in Germany] and his habilitation De Hrosuitha poetria [On the poetess Hrotsvitha], written and published in 1838 and 1839, respectively. Usually disregarded in analyses of Freytag’s oeuvre as insignificant minor texts or pointless Latin writings among his otherwise exclusively German historiographical and literary production, they serve, in a nutshell, as early comprehensive samples of his life-long approach to cultural historiography and German literature. More precisely, one could term them the ›groundwork‹ constitutive for many of his later efforts as a historian and author. Apart from dissecting Freytag’s qualification papers in this respect for the first time, the article also expands on the institutional framework of early nineteenth-century university education in Germany and its upheld practice of Latin scientific discourse.

Carolyn Dever. Chains of Love and Beauty: The Diaries of Michael Field

Michael Field, the pseudonymous authorial persona of Katharine Bradley and her niece, lover, and life partner Edith Cooper (they characterized themselves as ‘closer married’ that Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning), was the author of one of the most expansive and, until recently, neglected oeuvres in fin de siècle literature. Their published output included 27 verse dramas, eight volumes of lyric poetry, and a handful of short prose pieces. But arguably their greatest achievement was Works and Days, a 28-volume, 9500-page diary, which primarily covers the years 1888 until Bradley’s death in 1914 (Cooper predeceased her by nine months in 1913). Yet the diary has remained largely inaccessible to most readers. While Bradley and Cooper’s literary executor Thomas Sturge Moore (alongside his son) edited a single volume of selected entries in 1933, and a small selection edited by Ivor Treby was published in 2006, viewing the diary in all its messy magnificence required a visit to the British Library’s Manuscripts Reading Room (or from 2003 access to a microfilm copy and the patience of a saint). Yet from around 2015 onwards, the diaries have been digitized and are in the process of being transcribed, saving the neophyte reader the perils and pleasures of familiarizing themselves with Bradley and Cooper’s orthography. The volumes are a treasure trove: Michael Field encountered just about every important figure in fin de siècle literary London and penned vivid (and often amusingly virulent) pen sketches of Robert Browning, Vernon Lee, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Berenson, among many others. More importantly, Bradley and Cooper wrote beautifully about their love for one another, their creative process, their intellectual development, and the tragedy and beauty that dominated their lives. Despite its richness and value, the diary has yet to receive sustained critical analysis, until now.

The Forms of Michael Field, by LeeAnne M. Richardson

Reviewed by: The Forms of Michael Field by LeeAnne M. Richardson Carolyn Dever (bio) The Forms of Michael Field, by LeeAnne M. Richardson; pp. xi + 282. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, $139.99, $109.00 ebook. In The Forms of Michael Field, LeeAnne M. Richardson situates Michael Field—the composite identity of late-Victorian poets and lovers Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper—at the juncture of new theories of the lyric and of literary form. In their published poetry and verse drama, Michael Field are formally innovative and experimental, as Richardson and previous critics have argued. In this splendid book, Richardson takes this contention in important new directions by centering the poets' authorial signature, "Michael Field," as a formal challenge in its own right, both reflecting and overdetermining their formal experimentations: "scholarship has not fully accounted for the inextricably linked nature of their corporate identity and their literary forms" (2). The poets deploy "Michael Field" as a challenge to ideas of authorship and the lyric "I," and as a manifestation of their larger poetic project on par with their remaking of familiar lyric forms including sonnets, songs, and masques. As Richardson writes, Michael Field's "formal innovations originate in their engagement with and modifications, reinterpretations, and adaptations of their larger social world. For these reasons, a study of Michael Field is necessarily a study of a wide array of literary and social forms at the turn of the twentieth century" (4). For critics, the "Michael Field" proposition requires an unusual flexibility, precisely because Michael Field admit no neat pretense of separation between the literary and the social, notwithstanding the poets' continuous engagement with Aestheticist tenets. Michael Field thus engender (pun intended) a formal challenge to critical praxis as well. For to study Michael Field, Richardson contends, is to study the institutions of authorship [End Page 468] and literature as linked, formal phenomena, the poets rewriting the profile of authorship in the world as they reshape the lyric modes at the heart of their project. Richardson's organization reflects this interdependency, opening with an important consideration of "the significance of the Michael Field persona as a mode of selffashioning and a means of negotiating alternatives to traditional gender norms" and "relat[ing] Michael Field's self-authoring to their authorship, demonstrating how their conscious negotiations of self and form provides them personal and literary authority." Subsequent chapters address how Michael Field manage the commingling of personal and literary authority through negotiations of form across lyric modes. Richardson focuses on two dramatic verse forms, verse tragedy and masque, and on three lyric forms: the song, sonnet, and devotional poem. The chapters proceed chronologically as a means of examining Michael Field's "evolving experiments in adapting traditional forms to contemporary concerns." "Each poetic genre they appropriate," Richardson argues, "explores another way to represent poetic voice and identity, both of which provide ways for Bradley and Cooper to express their aesthetic, engage with modernity, and intervene in the world" (20). Richardson's taxonomy here follows Ana Parejo Vadillo's work in considering Michael Field's verse dramas—of which they published dozens—alongside Michael Field's more canonical lyric work. I appreciate this intervention on many levels, including the elevation by both Richardson and Vadillo of verse drama as a significant, underappreciated literary form in the period, as a majority of Michael Field's published work, and as the heart of Michael Field's own conception of their poetic project. "With their verse dramas, sonnets, and neo-renaissance songs," Richardson writes, "Michael Field is participating in a culture-wide appropriation of old forms for new uses" (17). Richardson situates Michael Field's early, acclaimed tragedy Callirrhoë (1884), the first work they published under what would then become their permanent nom du plume, as their aesthetic manifesto, "one that establishes the themes, forms, concerns, and beliefs that inform the rest of their writing lives together," specifically through the embrace of Dionysian inspiration (60). She further argues that, in composing Callirrhoë as a hybrid of forms—closet drama, verse tragedy, and lyric poems—Michael Field offer "lyric irruptions into the blank verse form" that allow them "to explore subjectivity, divinity, and imagination against a background of...

‘Blundering Brutuses’: Michael Field, Nonconformism, and The Politics of Social Purity

Abstract This article explores the contexts of nonconformism and social purity that underpin Michael Field’s (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) verse drama Brutus Ultor (1886). Based on new archival research, the article explores Bradley’s role in the Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act and argues that the play is a complex commentary on the social purity movement and, in particular, on W.T. Stead’s campaigning journalism. More broadly, the article argues for the importance of Michael Field’s nonconformist background in the development of their oeuvre.

All For Love; or, The World Well Lost by John Dryden

Reviewed by: All For Love; or, The World Well Lost by John Dryden Víctor Huertas-Martín Víctor Huertas-Martín. Review of John Dryden, Todo por amor, o el mundo bien perdido (All For Love; or, The World Well Lost), edited and translated by Rocío G. Sumillera. Madrid: Publicaciones de la Asociación de Directores de Escena de España, 2018. ISBN: 9788417189112 In his preface to All for Love; or, The World Well Lost, first performed at London's Theatre Royal (1677), John Dryden claimed to have outdone himself by using Shakespearean blank verse, albeit having adjusted Shakespeare's model to the neoclassical rules of the Restoration. In writing the first Spanish translation of All for Love, Rocío G. Sumillera did not copy Dryden uncritically either. While she accurately followed Dryden's text content-wise, the formal features of her translation bring potentialities to the play. Sumillera's translation was produced for a collection of Spanish versions of early modern English plays. These were carried out as part of "Entorno Digital de Investigación y Traducción del Primer Teatro Moderno Inglés" (GVAICO 2016–094), a research project led by Jesús Tronch-Pérez (Universitat de València, Spain). It was published with a preliminary study by Publicaciones de la Asociación de Directores de Escena de España and, with the publisher's permission, later appeared online on the EMOTHE Digital Library.1 Despite the dearth of Spanish translations of non-Shakespearean early modern plays, Sumillera could take vantage point from precedents to translating Dryden's work into Spanish. Her first model was José Luis Martínez-Dueñas Espejo's use of free verse to translate The Conquest of Granada; her second model was Mercedes Vella Ramírez's use of alexandrine verse to translate Dryden's satiric poetry.2 One benefit of using non-rhymed alexandrines to translate All for Love is that, as Sumillera explains, often, single lines suffice to express thoughts which, in Dryden, required enjambments.3 The length of alexandrines is balanced by a consequent shortening of the play from 2,613 to 2,561 lines, without any loss of content. The 332 truncated lines in Robert G. Lawrence's edition of All for Love, which was published in his anthology Restoration Plays and formed the basis for Sumillera's translation, are turned into shorter, complete lines, avoiding monotony in the pattern. These decisions favor suggestive [End Page 183] off-beat interventions and pauses in the alexandrines. Some select sequences maintain the original truncated lines—for instance, during Ventidius and Mark Antony's first encounter, a scene Dryden himself regarded as particularly successful—to highlight the scene's import. This stylistic variety permits a multi-faceted stageability, consistent with the heteroglossic features of contemporary verse drama, described by Kasia Lech as "a dialogical interaction between often contradictory viewpoints … [reflecting] the globalized world's multifaceted and pluralistic nature."4 A sense of relevance is, likewise, encouraged by the translation's bridging of present and past through its paratexts. As an overture to the edition, Sumillera inserted a quotation from C. P. Cavafy's "The God Abandons Antony" (1911): When suddenly, at midnight, you hearan invisible procession going bywith exquisite music, voices,don't mourn your luck that's failing now,work gone wrong, your plansall proving deceptive—don't mourn them uselessly.As one long prepared, and graced with courage,say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.5 The passage evokes Plutarch—a source for Dryden, as well as for Shakespeare—: the night before Caesar's arrival in Alexandria, a merry dance troupe is seen walking towards the city gates. It is a sign that Dionysus has turned away definitively from Antony. Cavafy's call to Antony to gather courage finds echoes across Sumillera's interpolations. Such interpolations implicitly resist a possible endorsement of Ventidius' sanctimonious diagnoses of Antony's daydreaming. It was, as Sumillera's conclusion reads, "worthwhile losing the world for love."6 Unsurprisingly, the translator's interpolations emphasize Antony's need to gather bravery more explicitly than it is done in Dryden. See, for instance: … Now she's dead...

Metrical Variation and Metrical Emendation in Q1 Hamlet

ABSTRACT Editors of Shakespeare usually assume that his dramatic verse is written in iambic pentameters. When they encounter anomalies, they are tempted to emend the verse, and they aim, through the use of accents, abbreviations and commentary notes, to explain the metre for their readers, including actors. In this essay we examine Q1 Hamlet as a special case: this so-called ‘Bad' Quarto appears to be entirely in verse on the 1603 page, but we discuss how and why five modern editions (including our own) have struggled to turn ‘bad' verse into regular pentameters or to print passages as prose, following the example of the longer, ‘good' texts. We ask whether readers are offended by anything less than ‘perfect' blank verse or whether they might find George T. Wright's suggestion of ‘the phrasal line’ helpful.